The Arctic We Don't Know

Jun 1, 2009 – The Fiddlehead

By Susan Haley

I should say up front that I found reading Dracc Dreque's memoir, Iliarjuk, a horrifying experience, and I could not recommend it without warning the reader that he or she will feel repulsion and disgust and will achieve no catharsis or sense of closure. Nevertheless I did recommend the book to several people, because of what it is about.

"Iliarjuk" means orphan in Inuktitut. The death of his parents from eating rotten seal meat is a snapshot in the mind of the narrator as a very young child. An aunt then adopts Dracc, and he is deprived of contact with his true siblings. In his adoptive home he suffers every form of cruelty and abuse, verbally and physically. He is seriously injured by his aunt, beaten by his adoptive older brother, the monstrous Dartly, he is sexually abused by older sisters, and feels himself enslaved to the whole family, especially to Coburn, his aunt's favourite child. Dracc remains a bedwetter into his teens.

Later, as a teenager, he is involved in violent fights, both as perpetrator and victim, and engages in sexual conquests bordering upon rape. As an older teenager, he embarks upon a career of vandalism and B&E, often, ironically, for candy. At the Iqaluit RCMP detachment, the police drink a toast the day he turns sixteen, when at last he can be prosecuted as an adult.

The last third of the book is devoted to detailed accounts of fights and exploits in the various jails and prisons to which he is sent, alternating with accounts of the vandalism, substance abuse, and sexual exploitation he engages in during his brief times of release.

This book depicts a culture of lawless children, learning only from each other and from the degraded adults who interfere with them. Although the author, who was born in 1964, was taken out on the land with his family and did learn to hunt and drive boats, he feels himself to be a "city boy" (Iqaluit being the "city"), his real life lived in the row housing, the schoolyard, the wastelands around town, and the dump, where he forages for sugar in the spoiled food.

The episodes of violence and cruelty recorded in almost every paragraph begin to seem almost gratuitous, as well as disgusting and overwhelming. I think the author's motive in writing the book was to extract some significance from his memories, but whatever relief this may have brought him, it is unlikely to produce similar feelings in the reader.

How terrible to have been born a girl in this culture of taboo-less kids.

From the adoptive sisters who rape Dracc, and who are later exploited by him, to the miserable Wendy who shared his wet bed as a child, to the subjects of his multiple later sexual exploits, and to Rhavenn, the mercilessly beaten and later murdered girlfriend of the bestial Dartly, all of the girls in this book are brutalized.

Dracc Dreque has a lively style and sometimes produces an unforgettable scene. His sister Wendy, herself also adopted and, like him, terrorized in childhood, reacts to Dracc's radio dedication of "Stand By Me" from the jailhouse: "At that moment, back home, Wendy cried her heart to the sea." There is a vivid description of a haunted house with the lights going on and off and all the doors slamming, while the terrified children huddle together in bed. "God bless you," says the author intermittently, a gesture of reconciliation for unreturned evil or thanks for small kindness. The book is full of amazingly bizarre fictional names–Dorn, Doiley, Stonery, Ghelayla–none of them (apparently) Inuit in origin.

George Amabile, the editor of this book, calls it "a tale of astonishing hardship and hope." The hope perhaps comes from the fact that the narrator is still alive, still writing and adding to his memoirs, and has not been in prison since 1983. However, this degree of closure comes only from the biographical note, not from the end of the text, which leaves him in the penitentiary.

The editor describes the length of time spent "trimming, rearranging" and revising the original manuscript. However, still more copy-editing/proofreading is needed. There are small errors, typos, grammatical problems, even printers' marks, left in the text, and these add, at least in a small measure, to the difficulty of reading the book.

What is described in Iliarjuk is largely invisible to southern Canadians except in the form of occasional news items (as in the coverage of the epidemic of substance abuse and suicide in Sheshatshui.) This book holds up a mirror to an ill-understood cultural phenomenon, or rather the phenomenon of the loss of culture. All the adults in the book are unpredictably cruel (and there is an unforgettable interview with the white school principal, who threatens the young boy with an axe.) There is hardly any evidence that the children in this book are Inuit. They could be slum children of any background.

Contrast Iliarjuk with celebrated arctic memoirs: Pitseolak, Pictures out of my Life, for example, or The Shaman's Nephew by Simon Tookoome. There will be no resemblance. Yet this book too is an account of growing up as an Inuk in the twentieth century.

(Published in The Fiddlehead 239, Spring 2009: 116-118)

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